Smoking, like many health-related behaviors, has "social" aspects. The smoking habits of my neighbors are likely to shape my own smoking habits, due to what is known in economics as “peer effects”. These complementarities in behavior may result from emulation, joint consumption, conformism,...

We study linear quadratic games played on a network where strategies are complements between neighbors and substitutes between agents at distance-two. We provide micro-founded problems where this pattern of interaction is due to a local congestion effect. Equilibrium behavior systematically...

Many types of economic and social activities involve significant behavioral complementarities (peer effects) with neighbors in the social network. The same activities often exert externalities that cumulate in "stocks" affecting agents' welfare and incentives. For instance, smoking is subject to...

Many types of economic and social activities involve signifcant behavioral complementarities (peer effects) with neighbors in the social network. The same activities often exert externalities, that cumulates in "stocks" affecting agents' welfare and incentives. For instance, smoking is subject...

This paper is based on the intuition of Dragonetti, an old Neapolitan economist, which argues that a society experiences economic and civic development if agents promote values and virtues, more than solely rely on punishments stated by law. We thus study the evolution of cooperative behaviors...

In this paper we study cultural diversity in values or personal norms concerning effort or work ethics, the related and observable diversity in behavior and its economic consequences. Our goal is to investigate the impact on this type of cultural diversity of primitive economic and behavioral...

This paper examines the dynamics of interethnic attitudes in a framework of intergenerational transmission of continuous cultural traits, where children are exposed to parental (vertical) and non-parental (oblique) socializations. Under very general conditions over oblique socialization,...

This paper studies the evolution of interethnic attitudes, the integration or segregation dynamics of ethnic minorities and the conditions for the rising of ethnic-based social hierarchies. By means of a cultural evolution framework, a dynamics of interethnic attitudes is provided and conditions...

Complex planning procedures often amplify the difference in investment time between generation and transmission. In this work we consider a transmission project in Italy and, relying on a recently proposed methodology, we compare costs and benefits of anticipating the planning process before the...

Incentive regulation in electricity distribution is expected to enlarge its scope, from an input-oriented instrument to one that includes additional, output-based incentives. This creates a potential conflict with more traditional concerns for productive efficiency. In the case of Italy,...